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Having written frequently in her novels about the impacts of climate change, Ms Atwood described the conditions which she believes currently disadvantage women.

"In a lot of the world women are in fact the food producers, and they're also the people who care for their families. The hotter it gets, the lower your harvest is going to be. If you have a flood, that's going to wipe you out.

"Women under those situations are going to suffer disproportionately."

Why women?

Morocco's former Minister of Environment Hakima El Haité agreed, citing the time women and girls spend fetching water - estimated to be over 200 million hours per day globally.

"The link between climate change, poverty and women is very, very close," she said.

"Women are on the front line of climate change - organising and resisting. Women are an essential part of the solution. [We] have different stories to tell based on our different experience."

"It's not enough to challenge an old narrative… you have to replace it with a better one."

A seat at the table

Christiana Figueres, a former UN diplomat who played a key role in the 2015 Paris agreement, noted that "there are not enough women" around the table in top level climate negotiations.

Yet she feels they have a vital role to play in policymaking.

"The women who are there are fantastic… I think the collaborative nature of the Paris agreement was very much led by the group of women."

Speaking about the upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report due this autumn, Figueres warned that the agreement's goal of limiting global temperature increase at 1.5 degrees Celsius was very much in danger. "[It's] going to say we barely have two seconds before we close the door on that 1.5 degrees."

For Hakima El Haité, the solutions to the gender imbalance are several fold.

"We first have to increase women negotiators.... This is still a male arena."

She is also in favour of social change which would see more women learn how to swim, so they are not caught by flooding when working in agriculture.

"It is not by chance that 80% of the dead we register in climate disasters are women," she commented.

Plastic problems

Also on the agenda were solutions to climate change and environmental issues that women are uniquely equipped to tackle.

Kath Clements, from UK company Mooncup which makes re-usable menstrual cups as an alternative to disposable sanitary products, cited the environmental impact of the "1.5 billion menstrual products flushed in the UK annually".

Other organisations, like the Women's Environmental Network, are moving to campaign for "periods without plastic" - seeking a reduction in the use of disposable menstrual products, and more education around reusable options.

Bloody Good Period, who donate sanitary products to asylum seekers in the UK, are also looking to use more environmentally friendly items says founder Gabby Edlin.

On the subject of plastic pollution in the oceans, Margaret Atwood described herself as "all in favour" of banning plastic drinking straws.

"Something has to be done about plastic going into the ocean and it has to be done pretty quick... That's where 60-80% of the oxygen than we breathe comes from," she said.

"We need that ocean to remain alive if we're going to have any hope at all."

About

The Ocean Action Hub is an open, interactive website providing information and promoting action globally to implement and achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14: Life below Water before 2020. The Hub was initiated to facilitate multi-stakeholder engagement as part of The Ocean Conference process, held in New York, 5 - 9 June 2017, co-hosted by Fiji and Sweden.